Kratimoyporroon has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Basically, I have a bunch of data I've gathered from an online forum: name, time, post length, and some other random statistics. I want to be able to sort this data by several different fields. Say, first by time and then by name. What data structure do you recommend, and are there any build in methods to sort this stuff? Could you give a brief example? Thanks.

If you want to stay within Perl to do this, you could use the Perl sort function. It allows you to write what is basically an anonymous sub to let you sort anyway you want. Of couse, this puts a constraint on your data structure to an array but if all the attributes are always in the same order then it does not make much difference.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other